· 20 ·

FROM AN EARLY ISSUE of Time, December 9, 1929: “A score of private plane pilots in various parts of the country are watching today the progress of Editor Joseph M. Patterson’s ten-thousand mile ‘air-cruise’ to the Caribbean in his all-metal, five-ton, amphibian aeroplane, although for obvious reasons Mr. Patterson prefers the description ‘flying boat’ over ‘air yacht,’ which the manufacturer, Sikorsky Aviation, employs in its advertising. The air cruiser, christened ‘Liberty’ for the occasion, has two large Vought engines, enabling it to fly at 120 miles per hour, at an expected altitude of 3,000 feet….In addition to Mr. Patterson and a crew of three, comprising pilot, Lt. Fred Becker, assisted by a mechanic and a radio operator, all three borrowed from the U.S. Navy, there are two guests on board: Mr. Floyd Gibbons, veteran war reporter, and Miss Alicia Patterson, the air-cruise commander’s daughter.” Alicia was just twenty-three that winter, not really young but not exactly old, not really married though not exactly unmarried; a last-minute addition to the Caribbean expedition, filling in for some nameless guest who had just dropped out. When she got the call from her father, already down in Florida, she packed her suitcase, took the train to Miami, where the seaplane or flying boat or air yacht was boarding, a surely strange contraption tied up to a dock in the harbor, and dutifully fit her small self in beside the luggage in the back of the cabin.

Father and daughter, with Patterson’s amphibious flying boat Liberty, before their 1929 “air-cruise” to the Caribbean.

First they flew out low across the waters of Biscayne Bay, then a one-hour straight shot over to Cuba, splashing down into Havana Harbor, peering out the little porthole-type windows at the still-visible wreckage of the USS Maine, with Morro Castle across the bay, and a flotilla of government launches approaching to take them ashore. Everywhere they went, people were nice to them, important people, unimportant people. After some days in Havana they flew off to Santo Domingo, rode horses around a coffee plantation; then up in the air again, zigzagging back and forth across the Caribbean: Belize in British Honduras, a small harbor not really equipped for air cruisers, where a squall came in while they were landing, Lieutenant Becker skillfully lifting off again, just in time, before two fishing boats were nearly blown right into them. Then Haiti, flying across the mountains into Port-au-Prince, where the president of Haiti gave them a big dinner, and the next day a quartet of young U.S. Marine Corps aviators took Alicia and Floyd Gibbons for a joyride in their pursuit planes, skimming over the mountaintops, diving down into the green valleys with the little tile roofs. However, in Haiti they started to have trouble: not with the plane or flying but with the pilot, Lieutenant Becker, who got so sick he had to be taken to a U.S. Navy hospital on the other side of the island. Becker said they should fly in a substitute, continue on their trip, but Patterson said he’d stick with Becker. While they were waiting around for Lt. Fred to get better, Floyd Gibbons said there was a ship in the harbor bound for Panama, only two days’ steaming, Panama with its superb fishing. And so off they went, a little detour to Panama. Floyd Gibbons, Poppa’s old buddy, with a patch over one eye, who’d made his name by tracking Pancho Villa through the Sierra Madre mountains for his famous scoop; and of course Poppa, who liked to fish, although he liked to move about on the spur of the moment even more than he liked to fish; and Alicia, who when she was around Poppa made it a point to be game for anything. The Swedish ship to Panama was okay; Gibbons played poker through the night, also the day. In Panama, which was known as the Canal Zone, they made a quick tour of the big locks and then went off to the Chagres River to fish at the Chagres dam, one of the world’s great places for landing tarpon, where you could actually see the huge steel-blue fish darting about in the water near the lip of the dam. What happened then and there probably wasn’t intentional, although who’s to say in the end what’s intentional or not? Years later Alicia said she was certain her father had been told about her problems, abdominal problems, female problems; after all, she used his doctor back in New York, Dr. Harold Meeker, and she knew they spoke together. About six weeks earlier, Dr. Meeker had examined her at Doctors Hospital, indeed opened her up because she was in pain, found nothing (though noting significantly on her chart, “patient unlikely to bear children”), stitched her up again, told her she could do the trip but avoid strains.

Now at the Chagres dam her father kept pushing her to get up on the spillway, to pull herself up onto the ledge of concrete, teasing, prodding, and finally she did it. That’s my girl, he might have said. Or maybe nothing; he wasn’t really a cheerleader. Which was when she felt something tear inside her, or pull, or something. She kept quiet about it; complaints were not rewarded. The next day they left Panama, and then Haiti too, and came back home. Where she hurt for a while until she didn’t, and put it out of mind. It was there the letter from the lawyer reached her; she was finally divorced from Simpson, legally single instead of make-believe single. Also a letter from Jim Simpson: “Dearest Monkee, I’m awfully glad we can part with friendly feelings….If I’d been more mature I wouldn’t have given you such cause for complaints….For this I’m sorry, for everything else I’m glad, I wouldn’t have missed that year with you as my wife for anything.” She thought it a sweet letter, and kept it in a folder next to her Ledyard Smith correspondence.